Now let us see how this produces pauperism and crises. In society we find laborers, capitalists, and landlords. These classes can exist only because there is a division of labor, and laborers produce more than they consume. Landlords and capitalists receive what is called rent, which is any income derived from the fact of possession and not from labor. All the rest is labor’s share. Now how does it happen that rent-receiving classes are able to exist? in other words, how is one man enabled to take from another a part of the fruits of his labor? This is because private property in land and capital exists. Land and capital constitute the instruments of labor, and without them production is impossible. Their possessors refuse to give them up to another’s use unless a share of the produce is guaranteed them therefor, while the laborer’s hunger and the sufferings of his family compel him to assent. Labor is treated as a commodity. It is bought and sold like other commodities, and its value depends on its cost. What is the cost of labor? Manifestly the cost of continuing labor; in other words, such means as will enable the laborer himself to live and to beget children who shall continue to labor after he is gone. What the laborers require to live, and to marry, and beget children in sufficient numbers to supply the labor market, is their standard of life. This they obtain and no more. Labor costs labor, and is measured by labor; but labor produces more than it consumes, and this surplus-value is rent. Does the laborer’s standard of life rise with the increase in productivity of economic forces? No, it is even doubtful whether it is rising at all. Then the conclusion is inevitable that labor’s proportion or quota decreases. Rodbertus thinks he can prove, from the income returns in England since 1800, and from the division of the national product of England into rent, wages, and profits, that the increased production of machine power, estimated as equal to the labor of five hundred and fifty millions of men, has benefited wholly and entirely landlords and capitalists.[166] Rodbertus puts the matter as follows to laborers: “Under the _régime_ of _laissez-faire_ and with our present property laws, your level, your portion of the goods produced, tends to fall, not to rise; to convince yourselves, look at our situation in general. Has the separation in the incomes of social classes become greater or smaller since we possess machines and railroads, and productivity and production have increased so remarkably? The answer cannot, indeed, be doubtful. Or consider our situation in particular, and ask the oldest among you whether, during the last forty years, wages—real wages, measured in what wages will buy—have increased as much in your fatherland or your native city as land-rent, or, what is the same, the value of the land, and as much as capital has increased.”[167] We have here, then, an explanation of pauperism and of discontent.